Starting ''Xvnc'' on-demand

A nice refinement is to configure the remote host to start Xvnc on-demand. By this I mean, when you connect to, say, your tunneled port localhost:5902 using vncviewer, the remote host should have an inetd listening on that port that starts your Xvnc for you. The line in inetd.conf might look like:

5902 stream tcp wait arfon /usr/bin/Xvnc Xvnc -Log *:syslog:30 passwordFile=/home/arfon/.vnc/passwd -inetd -query localhost -once

To use, you ssh to the remote host, which creates the tunnel, then vncviewer to the remote host, which creates the Xvnc if needed, and attaches it. I've seen at least one VNC viewer (bVNC) that has builtin support for ssh and combines these into one step, but haven't tried that.

Configured this way, Xvnc queries a display manager, which draws a login prompt before it creates your session, just the way it would on a “real” console. After that the Xvnc is persistent. You can detach from it and reattach from elsewhere and continue your work. (To prevent another authorized user from “walking up to your terminal”, you could set the vncpasswd, or you could xlock the display.) On my host I configured xdm as the display manager. It starts at boot time and handles the session query. This should surely be generalizable to other display managers but I have not tried it. –metaed